The University of Alaska spans how many time zones?

2037 day(s) ago

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Kravenhead

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I didn't know, so I looked it up and here's what I found:
"Alaska spans 57.5 degrees of longitude (four time zones), which is almost exactly the same as the 57.6 degrees between Maine and Washington, thus the "South 48" also span four time zones. Alaska includes the International Date Line, but by custom this boundary is bent to the outer edge of the Aleutian Islands. The westernmost time zone, centered on 180°, and extending from 172.5°W to 172.5°E, is numbered +12 and -12 because it is the twelfth zone east and west of Greenwich. Bering Standard Time is extended one zone west by custom, so this 12th zone is unnamed and not used in Alaska, which is the only state lying partly in the Eastern Hemisphere."

Thanks Captain,I forgot all about this question!
I sent a link to myself so I could read more about the
info at the bottom of the page. I sure do appreciate you
looking this up, tells me who is on the ball around here,
and that would be Kravenhead.

DixieRock

1296 day(s) ago

Sorry I cannot give you anymore points, but if I could I
would give you at least 1,000 more! Well worth it!!Thanks Kraven!

Kravenhead

1295 day(s) ago

Thanks Dixie, but I think Fafnir314 is right.
When I looked it up I forgot your question was about the University, not the entire state.
Fafnir314 raised some other good points too.

The previous answer was well-researched, but it completely missed the point.

The issue is a bit complicated, because "time zone" can have two different meanings. If you divide the globe into 24 evenly-spaced zones of longitude and give them designations - the basis for Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC - then it is true that the State of Alaska covers four of those zones; but most people use the phrase "time zone" to mean an area in which there is a single uniform OFFICIAL time, like Eastern or Central. For political and geographic reasons, these official time zones tend to follow state and national boundaries, not the longitude lines on a map.

In fact, Alaska used to have four official time zones, but in 1983 it was decided to put the whole state on a single uniform time, except for the most distant (and uninhabited) portion of the Aleutian Islands. This causes some anomalies as you travel West - for instance, the sun and the clocks are properly synchronized in Juneau, but an hour off in Anchorage.

But there is another wrinkle. The question was not whether Alaska spans four time zones, but whether its UNIVERSITY covers the same range. U of A has three campuses (Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage) which fall into just two of those evenly-spaced zones - UTC -09:00 and UTC -10:00 - and in fact they are barely one zone width apart, if you look at the actual longitudes of Juneau (134.6) and Anchorage (150.0). So the University spans at most TWO time zones, and if you consider the fact that the whole State is now in a single official zone, the correct number would probably be "one".